The present invention relates to ear ornament clips which include front and back parts which are so dimensioned and connected together as to provide greater ease in handling and application than prior ear ornament clip constructions.
An ear ornament clip construction is disclosed in United Kingdom Patent Specification No. 976,341, and the form in which the ear ornament clip disclosed therein has been marketed for more than ten years is illustrated in FIGS. 7 and 8 of the accompanying drawings.
FIG. 7 of the drawings illustrates a first clip member 10 (hereinafter called the front part) and a second clip member 11 (hereinafter called the back part) which are pivotally connected together at 12, the back part being in the position which it is able to occupy, and will in practice occupy, when the two parts have been separated to release the ear lobe. This condition of the clip, and indeed of any ear ornament clip, will be hereinafter referred to as the fully open condition. It will be appreciated that for a woman to apply the clip and the ornament carried thereby to her ear lobe, it will be necessary for her to put, for instance, her index finger in contact with the front surface of ornament 13 and the tip of her thumb in contact with the surface 14 of the back part 11. However, instead of being able to simply squeeze the front part 10 and the back part 11 towards each other, she must first push the back part upwardly about pivotal axis 12 relative to front part 10 in order to bring that back part into the position thereof which is illustrated in FIG. 8 of the accompanying drawings.
In practice, this necessity proves to be a complication from the woman's point of view because the ear ornament clip is extremely small and its smallness makes it very easy for a woman to inadvertently drop the clip in the course of trying to apply it to an ear lobe. In fact, the smaller the ornament 13 is, the more difficult is the task of application of the clip to the ear lobe. If the ornament were circular and of the diameter shown in FIG. 8 in full line, it would be relatively easy for the tip of the index finger and the ball of the thumb to exert a clip-closing force along, i.e., the line A--A shown in FIG. 8 whereas, if the ornament (for example, a small pearl) were to be of the size shown in dotted line in FIG. 8, the ability of the woman to exert pressure along line A--A without either the index finger or the thumb slipping off would diminish very considerably because the index finger would have much less area of ornament to which to apply the force. In fact, in experiments which have been conducted, particularly when the ornament carried by the front part 10 is quite small, it has been found that (with the front and back parts in the FIG. 8 positions) the index finger and thumb sometimes exert the force along line B--B because the thumb is not actually far enough along the back part 11 towards the curved end part 15 thereof. Discovery of this problem necessitates re-positioning of the clip carefully between the tips of the index finger and thumb and even then the closure of the clip to the lobe-gripping condition thereof can be quite a slow process.